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George Tenet is in the unhappy position of that man in the
Playboy cartoon who, discovered by his wife in bed with
another woman, famously demanded: "Who are you going to
believe, me or your own eyes?"

Mr. Tenet presides over the
Central Intelligence Agency, the
most prominent of the bureaucratic
screw-up agencies that failed, and
failed utterly, to give any warning
that Islamist terrorists were on
their way to September 11.

Having slept through all that,
the CIA now wants everyone to
believe that it finally has the right
stuff on Saddam Hussein.

In a less-forgiving
administration, Mr. Tenet would
have been retired to a cave in West Virginia. But this week
he came forward with another verse to the refrain stolen from
Alfred E. Neuman: "What, us worry?"

Mr. Tenet wrote a letter to Congress, undercutting
George W.'s fervent arguments that Saddam Hussein is a
mortal threat to the United States, that is a classic piece of
shoulda, woulda, coulda. Well, yes, Saddam is a menace,
and his efforts to obtain nuclear weapons to go along with his
biological and chemical weapons should be a matter of
"concern," maybe even "serious concern," but we can all go
back to sleep. As long as the United States doesn't do
anything to upset Saddam, he will have "little reason" to do
anything bad. George W. should just make sure he makes
nice.

"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of
conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or [chemical
and biological weapons] against the United States," Mr.
Tenet wrote to Congress. "Should Saddam conclude that a
U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably
would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist
actions." Note the abundance of weasel words in his letter:
"for now," "appears," "should," "could" and "probably." A
director of the CIA, even after putting his credibility through
the shredder in the run-up to September 11, can indulge in
"should" and "could" and "probably," but a president can't.

Loyalty to old friends is a Bush family characteristic,
admirable in most circumstances, but the mystery here is why
President Bush tolerates the disorder within his official family
when he is trying, against great odds, to convince the West
that niceness is not necessarily a virtue.

The president sent Ari Fleischer out to argue that Mr.
Tenet's letter undercutting the president's message does not
undercut the president's message. Mr. Fleischer has not yet
convinced even himself. "The only person who has sure
knowledge of whether Saddam Hussein will use those
weapons is Saddam Hussein," he said. "If Saddam Hussein
holds a gun to someone's head, while he denies he even owns
a gun, do you really want to take a chance that he'll use it?"

This underlines the inherent fault in the argument of the
naysayers, who quickly seized on Mr. Tenet's letter to bolster
their argument that although Saddam is bad and probably
psychopathic, there's no need to interrupt a nap just yet.
Later on, when Lower Manhattan is glowing in the dark,
there will be time enough to decide whether to do anything
about him.

The argument over whether to do anything about Saddam
is over, and the timid, the fearful and the frightened lost. The
protestations of the timid, the fearful and the frightened are
weaker with each new round of protest. First it was fear of
"the Arab street," then of Saddam's mighty army, the most
intimidating foe since the Army of Northern Virginia
threatened Washington 14 decades ago. Then it was
European reluctance to help. Then "quagmire." And only last
week two of our most distinguished pundits, reeking of
sociological insights, military lore and political acumen, argued
that the cause of regime change is tainted with racism. Racial
minorities would suffer most, said Phil Donahue and Chris
Matthews in the course of interviewing each other (not pretty
to watch), because America insists on dispatching black men
to fight wars organized by white men. This echoes Rev. Jesse
Jackson's slur on the eve of the Gulf war a decade ago that
"when that war breaks out, our youth will burn first."

Like so many of the "facts" cited on cable TV
smack-and-shout shows, these "facts" turn out to be mere
"factoids," things that appear to be facts but aren't. The
contributions of bravery and sacrifice by minority troops in
the Gulf war were immense, but, since Mr. Jackson brought it
up, 86 percent of those who died in 1991 were white, and
12.5 percent were black. Blacks comprised 13.1 percent of
the 1991 population.

Most of the pilots, special-ops troops and Navy SEALs,
who will take a large measure of the casualties if a new war
comes in Iraq, are white, and many of them are from
upper-middle-class families. Courage comes in all colors,
shapes and sizes, and such comparisons are odious. But the
dissenters, including reluctant spooks, are desperate for
arguments.